Our First Week!

Our first seminar meeting was so thrilling! I am so honored to be taking on this adventure with such a rich group of faculty and staff from across the Berkeley campus. We have about 22 professors, lecturers, visiting lecturers, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, librarians, and staff from Music, College Writing Programs, Public Policy, Public Health, Biology, English, Law, and more…

At our first meeting, we started with introductions and went over a general outline of our semester plan. Then we talked about the results of our pre-seminar survey which gave us a very good idea of the variety of skills and experience in the room. We then (actively) moved about the room writing on huddle boards all of the web 2.0 and online tools we could identify as useful and meaningful to us. (Full list available online shortly.) And then we discussed our homework, which was to:

Read “The New Media Reader, A User’s Manual” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
(Available online if you don’t yet have the text: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_preface.html)

Read “Inventing the Medium” by Janet Murray, from NMR, Introduction, page 3
(An online excerpt can be found online if you don’t yet have the text: www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-intro-murray-excerpt.pdf)

Participants seemed very engaged in the discussion. It was hard to bring the class back together and end. I can’t wait to see what others blog about their experiences in the class! Everyone can follow our posts, tweets, bookmarks, and photos along with the other participating universities by searching online for the tag: “nmfs_f11″ (#nmfs_f11 on Twitter.)

My first-ever podcast and introduction to this course is posted on our iTunes U channel here:
http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/awakening-digital-imagination/id466950565

Off to our next gathering!

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